The simplest form is to depict something protruding from it in the Frame Break — but anything 2D is possible. There are a thousand ways to do this, and a million reasons.

To represent the passage of time.

A four-panel newspaper strip might go like this... First panel: Alice says something weird.; Second & Third panel combined into one double-sized panel: Alice and Bob stare at each other.; Last panel: Bob calls Alice a weirdo. (In this case, the long panel represents a long pause.)

A full page in a comic might depict someone jumping out a window. The page will be divided into narrow vertical panels depicting stages of the character's fall. (Here, the narrow panels indicate that the action is happening very quickly.)

Two events are happening simultaneously in different places. Two triangular panels joined along their hypotenuses depict the events.

An explosion might be depicted in a jagged, pointy... umm... explosion-shaped panel.

If broken glass is involved, the panels might be shaped like jagged fragments of broken glass.

The path of a bullet might be drawn in a panel which spans the page left-to-right, but only occupies a small amount of vertical space.

A character picking a lock might be depicted in a key-shaped panel.

To reinforce a character's thoughts, the theme of a conversation, or a theme of the work in general.

A character who is very angry might be drawn in... err... a jagged, explosion-shaped panel.

Two characters flirting might be drawn in a heart-shaped panel.

A situation involving recursion or infinite regress might be drawn as panels within panels, getting smaller to the point of invisibility.

To break up visual monotony. This is at least part of the reason for probably 95% of oddly shaped panels.

Depending on how they are juxtaposed, can make following the sequence difficult, since there may not be a left-to-right (or right-to-left in manga), top-to-bottom order. Sometimes panels are even "superimposed" as if they were on top of each other; this is commonest in the Sub-TropeSpeechbubbles Interruption, where it is used to show talking over each other.

Examples:

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Comics

Will Eisner's The Spirit may be the Ur-Example of using unusual page layouts to visually reinforce story elements. This series invented many of the techniques mentioned above; indeed, much of the visual vocabulary of action-oriented comics can be traced to The Spirit. Only Orson Welles' film Citizen Kane is comparable in its acknowledged influence over an entire medium.

Jack Cole, who assisted Eisner on the Spirit for a while, would employ odd panels in his own comics, for example in the second Plastic Man story in this post all the parts of the story set in dreamland had wavy panel borders with black gutters in between them.

The Death of Superman comics, in 1992, has a very interesting example. It starts by the wake of Doomsday, who then starts attacking everything in sight, until Superman arrives. Then Doomsday focus on him only, and they start fighting, without dialogue (since Doomsday can't talk at all and won't stop its attacks), each page having 8 panels. The next issue was more pure fight, with each page having 7 panels. Then 6, then 5, and so on. The last issue, then, is composed only of single-panel pages of Supes and Dooms beating the crap out of each other, and in the last one both of them die.

Frank Quitely often experiments with odd panels, for example he will occasionally make the panel the literal fourth wall of a room. In We3 he gets really inventive with sequences using a large panel with a series of tiny panels showing all the small details of the scene layered on top of the larger panel, or in one sequence he tilts a series of panels sideways as a character is moving through them, and its awesome looking.

In the Graphic NovelJoker, a crash involving The Joker and the protagonist shows the characters' reactions to the impact drawn inside of the word "CRASH" as if the word was a panel. It also uses the "Broken Glass" effect mentioned above, as if the reader is watching the characters' reaction through the breaking windshield of the car.

Sounds as panels also appear in Frank Miller's work, for example when Marv shoots a corrupt preist in Sin City.

Winsor McCay's Little Nemo (1905) and George Herriman's Krazy Kat (1914), are possibly the trope makers. McCay created the elastic layout- in the later pages, almost no two panels are the same shape. In several story arcs, he has panel borders break or shatter after being pushed- or in one case eaten by the main cast. He was also one of the first to use the 'explosion' panel. Herriman's sunday layouts featured nested panels, inset panels on open backgrounds, slanted and sliding panels, and circular panels, among others. The layout varied wildly week to week- except for a brief color run in the 20's- and sometimes dispensed with panels entirely.

The Sandman uses this often and to great effect, being an account of the Lord of Dreams and those connected to him.

Regularly used in Alan Moore's Promethea. Most often this trope takes the form of having the panels evoke mystic symbols relevant to the subject of the chapter.

It should be noted that Promethea is Playing Against Type for Moore; most of his works are famous for adhering to extremely rigid panel divisions (specifically, the 3X3 grid), even in an age where such things have become outdated. Even his biggest action sequences rarely, if ever, step outside the boundaries of their respective panels.

One issue of John Byrne's run on Alpha Flight featured Snowbird facing one of the Great Beasts, Komolaq, described as "the living embodiment of winter". The battle featured a number of unusual frame shapes and placements, made all the more noticeable in that the frames were all blank(the idea was to depict the battle taking place within a severe blizzard, with nothing but flying snow visible). Only the frame shapes and locations, along with dialogue, provided any clues to the action. A Crowning Moment of Awesome for John Byrne, in that he made the fight work on the page.

The New 52's version of Swamp Thing makes the panel borders shaped like tree branches, most often when Alec Holland is using his powers.

One issue of The Fox And The Crow featured Crow dressed as a giant (with stilts); the reveal-panel was elongated to accommodate his increased height.

In part one of Maus, when Vladek sees a pair of Nazis up and shoot somebody in the street for the first time, he is depicted panicked looking, in a Star of David shaped panel, emphasizing his vulnerability, as a Jew, in how to respond. If he ran, he singles himself out as a target, if he stays, he could be caught up in a broader pogrom.

Luther Arkwright: Done very liberally from the beginning of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright in 1978. Some examples:

Overlapping panels

A single scene covering an entire page, with panels overlaid

Pages with no panel borders at all, all the "panels" bleed together and form a single whole

In Astro City, Camilla at the carnival in "Pastoral" features panels like a ferris wheel — with the borders being lights.

There's some panels in Ichigo Mashimaro that are convex quadrilaterals, some of which are right-angled trapezia. ...trapeziums? Nothing odder than that, though...

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure uses a lot of slanted panels. The end of Part 5 gets especially hectic. Though he makes pretty good use out of this. Instead of entire panels to show character reactions like he did before part 4, he later uses only small, circular panels to show character reactions, possibly a lampshading of how quick such reactions would be in real life, therefor it'd be just as quick to look at them.

Project 0 does this all the time to the point that no two pages are really designed alike. Notable example on page 6 where Owen's fall is fragmented into vertical frames like the symbol for signal strength bars to show that his powers don't 'get reception' in the Machine Graveyard.

Sluggy Freelance switches from its usual rectangular panels to slightly irregular, smooth-sided ones when depicting Gwynn's demon-possessed dream sequences. These are also surrounded by border text, usually the repetition of Arc Words, but occasionally the panel boundaries open slightly and the border text nearby changes to reveal a meta-clue.

Aaron Diaz doesn't seem to like even rectangular layouts. He frequently uses circles or cuts the page into triangular shapes.

Casey and Andy did this once when they were literally breaking their own reality.

Tally Road constantly does it, either with radical and strange panel shapes or by simply using the angle of vertical panel borders to imply the state of mind of the characters. More askew angles are associated with more unstable feelings. At one point, passing time is represented by the panel borders 'sweeping' to increasing angles like the hands of a clock.

El Goonish Shive has it well established that rounded corners are fantasy, dream, or narrative. The artist also likes to let force effect the panels, one particularly powerful punch actually made the whole panel order bow to the left.

The panels of Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name are very frequently irregularly-shaped (check out the center bottom panel here) or overlapping. It fits with the high-energy feel of the comic and its manic protagonist.

Non-rectangular panels are rare, but more recently, floaty-freeform-layout panels superimposed on a partial background have become the norm. Tilted panels show up occasionally in action scenes, such as the "Kyaaa!" panel here.

In Far from Home, Eyak's reaction to the pilotting is shown in a hexagon on top of two panels showing the ship dodging asteroids.

In Ears for Elves, a series of short, wide rectangular panels indicate zooming in/panning down here.

In Dominic Deegan: Oracle For Hire, planar or psychic magic is shown via unusual panels. If an extraplanar entity is spying on the cast, he will show up outside the panel. When Dominic went to the elemental plane of destruction, his progress was shown as a panel getting periodically blasted and damaged. Most recently, when the King held the demiplane with Nimmel on it hostage, he elbowed the panel, which then chipped away at the demiplane. In that same battle, the fight taking place on two planes is shown by the King reaching from one panel to the other.

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